As strongly as many of us are on a particular side, the latest battleground for and against material support for overseas belligerent fascism is just a lightning rod for a deeper struggle.
While most of the individual members of the state are just rallying around the flag, the core ideological group inside the state has the belief that the public must never be allowed to dictate the choice of geopolitical ingroup and outgroup. The repression they are enacting isn't about lsreaI per se, it's about the principle of the thing.
The investment thesis in AI is that the decline in consumer spending in the other sectors of the economy won't matter when the consumers cease to be a significant participant in the economy in the near term: that moving investment away from the activity in agriculture, transportation, goods and services, etc., is rational because those sectors are soon to be obsolete when their customers buying power and long term capacity to produce buying power is sucked away.
Think of the promise of AGI as a promise of billions of tireless immigrants with PhDs who outcompete the other ethnicities in the labor market. It's the same reason people stopped investing in Detroit-based things years ahead of the industry pullout.
I’m not sure I follow. So, are you saying that wealth will become completely concentrated at the top and the rest of us are obsolete, out of work and broke?
That seems unlikely. What is the point of an economy if there is no one who is actually able to consume?
It’s more likely than you think. In fact, this was true for almost the entirety of human history. The last 100 years, where the common person is NOT in destitute poverty, is the exception to the rule.
There will not be no one who is able to consume. The investment thesis is that the investment classes' servant robot armies will be doing trillions of USD of consumption, mostly in metals, munitions, chips, etc.
I don't agree with the thesis, but that is what the thesis is.
No, we need entertainment, potato chips, some drugs and the mandated degree of access to contraceptives. I'm sure OpenAI can calculate the optimal levels of each.
And the current reaction is to make entertainment and potato chips more expensive, and to ban contraceptives and drugs.
The only saving grace of this administration's cruelty is its stupidity. It wants to rule like Rome over slaves, but didn't learn how the rulers kept the populace from uprising and rebelling.
Yes, the time-honored strategy of keeping the poi holloi fed and entertained just enough to prevent riot, but not anymore.
Long-term, it usually fails because the elites become too greedy and too complacent because they haven't seen what a large scale riot looks like, and try to squeeze too much. Then things blow up somewhere and there's a mad scramble to prevent it elsewhere by making concessions (witness all the improvements in labor rights in the West after the Russian revolution).
The point of an economy is to put a stupid flag on mars. Or to melt the ice caps so that Russia has access to ports that aren't clogged with ice. Or to get revenge and throw lavish parties. Or any of a million other arbitrary goals dreamed up by those few who get to steer this thing.
For most of us its just gas or breaks, but those at the top have non economic goals. The economic indicators are looking positive because progress is being made towards those goals, but the gloom persists because most of us don't want the outcomes that were progressing towards.
We're in a car that we can't steer, and the economist article says everything is fine because look how high the number on the speedometer is.
more importantly, good luck to any country that has to deal with an environment full of huge swathes of people festering with the anger and nihilism that comes from going from something to nothing...not for me
To answer your question, the links mean that it has achieved compliance with the laws of the governments of the other countries it operates in, no more than that.
Your geopolitical insinuation is interestingly monofaceted, however. Ignoring the many domestic pressures at the time which are relevant (such as vote share in arms-producing districts), the 2016 action by the US (1) acted as a small hedge against any gains in regional power by China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Russia, Turkey or the United Kingdom (such as market share or diplomatic point-scoring) while (2) simultaneously implying to MBS that, in the short term (2-5 years), he was on his own with respect to Iran and (3) moderately reinforcing the carefully cultivated political aesthetic of U.S. impulsivity and violence.
All three of those modest goals were achieved and were later undermined by unforced errors elsewhere. Alternatively, one could consider that those goals were achieved to build up a reserve of political capital that could be expended to permit the unforced errors elsewhere.
That one might be there for other reasons. Shipping to Greenland is generally pretty hard. Nuuk is easy enough, but other parts of Greenland aren't getting packages delivered for the rest of the year. We had to deal with cut of dates for Christmas being mid October. Maybe that has changed in later years, I haven't checked.
Israel also feels a little off. I doubt that that's there for the same reason as e.g. Taiwan or Kazakhstan. Or San Marino, that's not there due to war, sanctions, shipping or trademark violations.
It seems like they had a number of reasons to disallow businesses in various countries and now they're blocking them as one big chunk to avoid uncomfortable answers about individual countries.
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